Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Gears of War: Emergence Day

My work here was part of the experiential site for the first Gears of War game. In this site you're looking through the eyes of Marcus Fenix who's in jail remembering the events that led him to being incarcerated through a series of cryptic flashbacks.

This was my first project where I was leading the video production. This could have something to do with the fact that I was the only guy doing any of the video production work, but I like to think that's cuz they wanted to give me a trial by fire.

My task was to create videos for the 4 different flashbacks. This was very much a precursor project to the Iris work I did for Halo 3, in that I was given a selection of stock footage, game footage, and a dev kit to capture more game footage from. What I couldn't get from that wound up either being quickly made in Maya or got composited together from high res concept art.

One of the cool things about this project is that Epic Games gave us the entire sound library from the game. So when you're hearing the sound effects and the Locust are screaming at you, you're actually hearing what you would hear in the game. The VO is mostly made up of talent we pulled from our office, with a few choice tracks of Marcus and Dom scattered throughout.

I spent 2 weeks on this project. The last 4 days were spent working without sleep, at the end of which my body just about gave up on me and I came down with what is to date the worst cold/flu/debilitating sick feeling I've ever had. I actually tried to come in and keep working but was turned away with the same kind of regard people used to give to leper. I took the hint and ended up relinquishing the last few corrections of work to my good friend Caio who added the finishing touches to the gritty masking effect and handed off final assets to the developers.